The costly storage isn’t worth it, apparently.
Peertube can stream
It’s true, they can. But that storage isn’t cheap either. If everyone up and walked away from twitch the peer tube instances couldn’t handle it in bandwidth or storage.
I honestly like to see peer tube architecture change a little bit. Instead of contributors needing to stand up an entire server to join in the pool maybe They could just leave a platform dependent executable running that provides local storage and peering, The indexing could still be left to the hosted servers.
I feel that everyone should be paying to host their video locally, and then benefit from Network peering for distribution.
The fact that commercial sites pay to keep nearly limitless amounts of your files online as frankly insane.
PeerTube already have tools that can contribute to the network of instances.
You have “remote runners” which can very easily be set up, which can off-load transcoding of videos and live streams, as well as some other tasks like subtitle generation and thumbnails.
You can also enable redundancy on an instance, which will download videos from other instances and then function as a peer and temporary backup of the video, in case the instance is down.
What I would like to see next, is an easily installable client that will allow users to function as a peer for videos.
The biggest issue however, is storage. Not sure how that can be solved.
The server itself is great, splitting services out is FAB. The content mirroring… chefs kiss.
To be entirely clear, what’s missing and what we need is a Mac, Windows and Linux stand alone app. (low configuration) You point it to your videos from local storage/network and they become a locally hosted resource (torrent like), You then connect to a real hosted server, where your indexed, media and meta are populated. Your app gets port forwarded, so the public server is just indexing you and pointing people to you.
If something happens to the public server you’re on, you point to a new public server and all your content still exists. Pirate radio style.
Since you log into the public server as a user, they can still moderate you as they see fit, block your content, or mirror your content to their server with the already existing features. If you don’t like how they handle you, you can move to another server, or host your own somewhere.
This puts the onus of base storage and the first hop of network connectivity on the content maker. But disks are cheap, and the network is peer-based, so if you get popular, your own watchers will help each other out.
Then you might as well just host your own PeerTube instance, which is also something I would encourage big content creators to do. Problem is, you would have to be a bit tech savvy to install and run PeerTube.
The standalone app you talk about probably doesn’t work in practice. What happens when the user shuts down their computer? The videos become unavailable. Then what?
What could work is a 2-in-1 solution, where a content creators video backup also functions as a peertube instance.
Content creators back up their videos, so why not make the videos available for watching, from the same storage?
Then you might as well just host your own PeerTube instance
Your average person is not capable of setting up, hosting, backing up and maintaining a proper Peertube instance. A large part of my dayjob is in hosting and infra, and I have set up a PT instance before. Honestly, even as far as average hosting goes, their setup is kind of needy. Most dockers are like start, port, go these days. As soon as you mandate that they have DNS and a working 443 upfront, you’re kicking most people out before they start.
The standalone app you talk about probably doesn’t work in practice.
There is no challenge there that cannot be overcome by application architecture. I don’t see anything that is a deal braker, and there is definitely a need out there, but it’s a damn big project and the makers of PT aren’t just doing straight up charity.
What happens when the user shuts down their computer?
Indexer loses heartbeat, content shows up as unavailable. Configurable by admin to disappear from searches after x time. Current watchers: If enough people were watching the stream currently/recently, they’d keep going from each other’s cache as peertube will actually peer. (I’ve tested the peer part, it does what’s on the tin) If no one has future segments, they’d get kicked out same as if the server went offline. Most content creators would be pretty careful not to do this. It would also be an interesting thing to explore the mirroring functionality and have small creators team up and mirror each others data, doing a kind of remote replica between friends thing.
What could work is a 2-in-1 solution, where a content creators video backup also functions as a peertube instance.
That’s actually kind of my point. It’s mostly Peertube, but without users trying to deal with nginx/apache, redis/postgres, port 80/443 ips issues, SMTP, DNS and SSL. Someone who is capable of dealing with those parts just stitches them on as remote content. The servers don’t pay for storage or most of the networking and they help the clients with visibility and getting around ISP limits.
If we try to setup end users with the whole shebang, they’re going to run into issues when the Redis goes RO from running out of space/memory, or when they have disk issues and the postgres goes tits up. (or god forbid PT needs a DB upgrade or something) They don’t know about services and recovery, they’re not capable of setting up backups or running restores.
Hell maybe the app is also the consumption part as well. You watch peertube by running the PT desktop app. Then we can deal with self signed certs. run people on sqlite and local shared host memory instead of redis. We’d still need remote trackers to help orchestrate the DHT.
I duuno, it’s big, it’s pain. I think if it were available, big tech (and honestly big brother) would be shitting themselves.
Honestly that is a great idea. With a p2p network you could have automatic NAT traversal so that all one would need to do is run a client on a PC that would be the central source for content. From a viewer perspective you could have some sort of caching system that would reduce the network load.
I don’t see Peertube doing anything like that and the current organization behind it isn’t great. It needs a lot of funding and ambition with a clear monetization strategy.
Peer tube already supports P2P. If 10 people are all watching the same video they’ll share pieces to other people.
I was trying to throw it up in my home lab a couple of months ago and having to set it up with public access DNS and namespace beforehand seemed unnecessary. If there was an option where At least in part it were just like a torrent client I think it would go over a lot better.
I think it needs a more decentralized architecture with central control servers managed by a company. The community would do the bulk of the lifting and the company would scrap revenue off the top. They would manage a payment system for paid content and merch.
No good having it centralized and managed by a company.
It will never be all that useful then. You need some sort of financial support. Video content is expensive.
Wish they would go after the starting soon screen that most run for 30 minutes before they actually get on to stream
What exactly is the harm? I would assume they are checking to ensure all of their hardware and software is working as intended. You’re free to view something else or enjoy an entirely different activity in the interim.
I think what they mean is that it takes storage space for no reason after the stream is over
That’s viable. I think limiting total storage and leaving it up to them to trim the video down is a good solution.
If someone says the show is starting at 7:00 and I arrive at 7:00 I expect their show to start within a few minutes. If they’re still checking to make sure things are working a half an hour later, they fucked up.
That sounds very entitled, honestly. They have zero obligation to you, and things happen.
They have every obligation to their subscribers. Streamers are professional beggars, suggesting that they have no obligation to their viewers/subs is kind of ridiculous.
They literally don’t. You are not buying the person, that is ridiculous. If you feel inclined (you’re not to), you can send money because you enjoyed the stream or whatever. Throwing money at them did not create an obligation on their part. That’s entitlement.
What exactly do you think the business model of streamers are? We’re not talking about Joe playing baldurs gate with his 15 subscribers. We’re talking about Rihanna showing up 4 hours late, drunk as fuck.
Rihanna is a billionaire. Streaming is not in her business model. 🤣
No you’re buying the content, which is the person. I’m not debating this with you.
Then why are you debating? You’re wrong and entitled. Frankly, it’s a bit disgusting to think you have purchased a person for $5 or any amount.
I do considered myself entitled to people keeping their word. It’s obviously a dying belief however.
